Listening to Stories

Reading is something I enjoy doing a lot. I can't stand it when I don't have time to read. Working and going to school can really eat up any extra time you have. Reading a gazillion research articles is nothing compared to a good story. So I tried audio books. They are great- especially when it read by an excellent reader/actor like Jim Dale ( reader of the Harry Potter books). I say actor because a really good reader uses different voices for the characters and conveys what each character feels. Anyway, so I begin borrowing audio books from the library. Sometimes they were available immediately and sometimes I had to wait. But many times I didn't want to wait. So I downloaded audio books from the library using Overdrive or bought books from Audible. But one of my favorite ways to hear new stories is listening to podcasts like Escape Pod. Escape Pod presents science fiction short stories for the public. The readers are good and some are writers of short stories also. Most of the stories are between 30 to 60 minutes long. Go to the site and listen to a story. There are at least five years of stories waiting for you to try.

Downloadable Media (Week 9: #22)

Downloadable media is great for when you can't get to the library or you can't to read a book(like when you're driving). LibriVox appears easy to use. Unfortunately something was wrong with the archive and I could not search for any titles. Many of the titles LibriVox are classics or books published before 1923.

Wowio is a local Houston company that offers not only public domain downloable books but copyrighted books for no charge. There are even comics and graphic novels. How do they do it? Unfortunately, they use commercial sponsorships to compensate the authors. There are questions about your habits that are a part of the registration process. They used this information to send their users advertisements. If you don't want any promotional emails, you should make sure the statement about accepting them is not checked.

Using OverDrive is a little more involved than Wowio. You won't be asked any questions but you do have to download software. This is important especially if you are using a library computer that doesn't have the software loaded on it already. Most libraries do not allow the public to download anything onto the hard drive. OverDrive will also ask you to download a security update for Windows Media player. The plus side of this is that this allows OverDrive to offer you copyrighted material for free through the public library and without advertisements. I have only one compliant and it's not really a compliant. So many people like OverDrive, you will probably have to place a hold on popular or well-known titles for a chance to check them out.